If in doubt, hold an inquiry.

That seems to be the thinking in Britain when tragedy or scandal strikes.

Last week, the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, a government investigation that was created in 2017 after a devastating residential fire killed 72 people, issued its final findings.

The damning report found plenty of blame to go around: unscrupulous manufacturers failed to disclose that their products posed a catastrophic fire risk; reckless deregulation allowed those materials to be used on high-rise residential projects in Britain even after they were banned in other countries; and a cost-cutting local government approved the use of dangerous materials even though they had already been implicated in another deadly fire.

But it took more than six years for the inquiry to finish. And London’s Metropolitan Police Department has said that it will need a further 12 to 18 months to determine whether to bring criminal charges.

“If one was being very cynical, one could argue that this is kind of the point of doing these very long inquiries,” said Sam Freedman, a former adviser to a Conservative government minister and the author of the book “Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It.”

Because such inquiries take a long time, “by the time you get to publication, the people who are named as being responsible aren’t in power,” he said, and public anger has dissipated. There are still some political costs from opening an inquiry, Freedman said, but they’re far lower than more immediate and concrete policy responses would be.